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‘Through the fire’

Edwin Coleman has strode through life against a tide of racism

Anyone who hits age 84 no doubt has many tales to tell, but Edwin Leon Coleman II’s are as remarkable as any.

Geographically, Coleman’s stories span the country from Arkansas in the Deep South to California and on up to the Pacific Northwest, first in Washington and then Oregon.

Racially, they include the hush-hush intermixture of white and black that have characterized this country from the introduction of slavery onward to the separation of the races in the Jim Crow days and beyond.

Musically, he’s shared the stage with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Vince Guaraldi, Cal Tjader and Peter, Paul and Mary.

Educationally, he tells of a father and mother who finished the sixth and 10th grades, respectively, although he eventually earned a doctorate and became a professor of English at the University of Oregon.

Politically and socially, Coleman recounts heady days of black activism that included meeting the Rev. Martin Luther King and, decades later, becoming a de facto spokesman for the black community in his adopted city of Eugene, where blacks make up only 1.09 percent of the population.

From South to West

Coleman laid a panoramic photograph down on his dining room table, the picture much longer than tall and filled with dozens of people in long rows staring soberly toward the unseen cameraman.

He pointed to a stern-visaged man toward the left end and said, “That man is my grandfather.”

The man, like the rest of the people in the photograph, is white. Coleman is obviously black.

The picture was taken at a family reunion in the town of El Dorado (pronounced with a long “a” sound) in Arkansas.

“My grandmother was his family’s laundress,” Coleman said. “She had four children by him.”

The question of how that happened — whether through racial prerogative or mutual affection — hangs in the air. Even when Coleman and his wife of 53 years, Charmaine Coleman, talk about the subject, the conversation is fraught with the historical contradictions.

On the one hand, “Ed’s grandfather behaved the way white men did in that time and place,” she said. On the other, “Because of that, so much of our history is not known — dark skin, light skin — and when it’s being passed down, we need to respect the fact that we made it out, we had the strength to come out.”

She fears that many young black people now “don’t want to honor the things that were so horrible from the past and need to be remembered.”

Or, as he muses, that if people “don’t know and read that history, they don’t know where to go because they don’t truly understand where (as a people) they have been.”

At some level, though, both Colemans seem to accept the facts, if not the morality, of that past.

“Women had to do what they had to do to survive,” Charmaine concludes about Ed’s grandmother, as he contemplates the relationships that resulted.

“My grandfather’s wife apparently may have believed those four children were by her son,” he said. “(The wife) and my grandmother never had a contentious relationship.”

The pull-and-tug of inequalities of power still are erupting and remaining unresolved, Ed Coleman noted, such as the ongoing furor at the University of Oregon, where he is emeritus professor of English, over the propriety of keeping the historical name of Deady Hall.

Its namesake, Matthew Deady, not only was an important judicial and constitutional figure in the state’s early history but also, at least through part of his life, pro-slavery and anti-black.

Despite, or maybe because of, Coleman’s personal experience with racial bias, his participation in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s — “I’ve had urine thrown on me, I’ve been through the fire,” he said — and his decades of advocating for racial equality in the Eugene community, Coleman now takes a wider philosophical view.

“I understand that (black) kids now want to be recognized, and that they want others to respect who they are and that what they do matters — and I agree completely with that,” he said.

“But it does not serve us well to erase people like Deady and Joseph Lane from our history. If we do that, we have to erase the good as well as the bad — and that means we would have to get rid of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, too, because they owned slaves.”

He has concluded that while institutional racism dies hard, it’s up to individuals to lead the way by eradicating bias among themselves.

When his black grandmother still was doing laundry for his white grandfather’s family, his mother, Mae, used to go along to the house to play with one of her little white half-brothers, Coleman said.

Many years later, the brother found Mae and invited her and her sister — also his half-sister — to a family reunion.

“They were completely accepted by the family and had a great time,” Coleman said. “My aunt told me, ‘Edwin, I was just not believing what I was seeing, because all those white and black kids were swimming together in the pool.’ ”

For his part, “I grew up living Jim Crow — I didn’t think about it then, it was just part of life,” Coleman said. “I know life shouldn’t be that way, but I don’t look back in anger.”

Finding what matters

Ed Coleman’s parents met in El Dorado. His father, originally from Alabama, had finished sixth grade when his mother died and the boy had to quit school to help his father.

“My grandfather got so depressed, he started drinking heavily, and all the kids were sent to live with aunts,” Coleman said. “My father could read, write and compute (arithmetic). He became a porter on the railroad, but when he moved to El Dorado, he was a barber.”

His mother worked out of home as a domestic, so his grandmother — he and his siblings called her Mama — took care of them while she still did the laundry from the big house, heating water in a big tub on the stove.

“I had seen her light the stove with a piece of paper,” said Coleman, who was barely walking at the time. “I put a chair up to the stove, got a piece of paper and did what I’d watched her do, and I burned the left side of my face and the tip of my left ear,” he said, pointing to still-visible scars.

One of his fonder memories is sitting down with her at the end of the day when she would make a pot of coffee.

“She had really delicate china, and I would beg her for coffee. She would pour 10 percent coffee and 90 percent cream, and she would pour a little bit that I would sip from a saucer.”

In those days, black people discouraged children from drinking coffee “because they said it would turn you dark,” he recalled.

“I would say, ‘This is good coffee, Mama,’ and she would say, ‘Yes, this is good coffee.’ ”

His beloved grandmother died when he was 6 years old, and her body lay in state in the living room of her three-room house. Coleman saw the open casket and, afraid to look, ran outside.

“I remember a neighbor or family friend chasing me halfway down the block and catching me and saying I had to see her one more time,” he said, “and I was kicking and screaming as he put my head over the edge. For a small child, that was traumatic.”

By then, his mother was working for a dry cleaner, and Coleman had begun his lifelong love of musical performance.

“My dad took me to a minstrel show — he had a friend in the show who played the violin,” he said. “I just stared and stared at it, and he said, ‘Do you want to play that, boy?’ and I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ My dad finally found a quarter-size violin, and I started taking lessons.”

The teacher lived a mile away, so the little boy would walk to his house, take his lesson, and the man would walk him back downtown to his mother at the cleaners.

“He was very old, and one day I was walking ahead of him down the street, about a block from her work, and I heard a ‘click click’ and it was his cane — he had fallen in the gutter.

“I ran to get my mom, but her boss said she had gone to meet my daddy, so I ran back and my teacher was taking his last breath.

“I used to wake up at night, calling his name.”

As a child, Coleman experienced the biased life of the traditional South.

“Most black men had a streak of anger in them,” he said, recalling what author James Baldwin once told him when the two met in San Francisco during the civil rights era, “that if they didn’t, they were probably mentally incompetent.”

“I remember black people couldn’t vote because they couldn’t afford to pay the poll tax,” Coleman said. “I remember going to the movies and having to sit in the ‘crow’s nest’ and being in line at the store and the white people pushing in ahead. I remember if a white person came on the street, the black people would have to step aside, even off the curb.”

During World War II, Coleman’s family lived in a racially segregated housing project in Alameda, Calif., just across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco, where many people had come to work in the shipyards.

“The shifts ran 24/7, so it was like daylight around the clock with shipbuilding and naval planes flying in so close you could tell if the pilots had shaved that morning,” Coleman said.

“If you were a black boy in the projects and you played violin, you were considered a sissy, so every day when I got off the bus after school, I’d get chased and pinned down, but nobody ever tried to damage my violin — they knew my daddy, even though he was only 5-foot-3.”

He wanted to switch to trumpet, “but the teacher said my lips were too thick, so he asked me to play mellophone, which had a bigger mouthpiece,” Coleman said. “I played that for a year, and then I played baritone horn.”

Of the 2,000 students in his high school, only 150 were black.

“It was a really rough school, and the black kids were pretty much ignored, unless they were able to play football or basketball,” he said.

With his small stature, that was out of the question, and he “never went to a sock hop, a junior prom, a senior ball.”

He wanted to take drama in high school, but on the first day the teacher took the roll and when she got to him, “She said, ‘Edwin, I don’t think we’ll be doing any plays you can be in,’ ” he said.

“But later I was asked to be a page in the Christmas pageant, and a light clicked in my head, and I said, ‘No.’ I realized they just wanted a black kid to do it, but they ended up using a white kid with blackface.”

Nor was it easy to get a decent education without someone running interference, a task that fell to his mother.

“I came home with the schedule my adviser gave me at the start of freshman year, with auto shop, wood shop, English 101, bonehead math and PE,” Coleman said. “The next day, my mother took off work and went to talk to the adviser — I had never heard her raise her voice — and when she came out, she was red as a beet, but she had a new schedule.”

It was tough, starting with algebra, “and I didn’t talk to her for three days,” he quipped.

The adviser’s original choices reflected the social strata of the school, he said.

“There were three levels of people there, those who came for the war effort, the white middle-class kids and the upper-class white kids,” Coleman said. “The bottom level consisted of the Okies, the Arkies and the darkies.”

He graduated from high school and enrolled at San Francisco City College, “because you could count on both hands the number of black kids” at the University of California at Berkeley.

He also joined the Air Force Reserves, “because they needed people for Korea.”

“At City College, there was a jazz band, and half of the people in the band were in the reserves at Treasure Island,” Coleman said. “They all got called for active duty, had three weeks to train before being sent over to Korea, and half of them never came back.”

One of those had been a bass player, “and when he left I told the teacher I would like to play bass. He said to grab one and come in and practice.”

Coleman soon was called to active duty and stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, where he played in the band, quickly rose in rank “because I could type and do shorthand” and also played gigs with quartets and quintets all over the Spokane area.

Two years later, out of the service, he finished at the two-year City College and then enrolled at San Francisco State College, later San Francisco State University.

He taught theater at San Francisco State and Chico State University before moving to Eugene, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1971 and remained on the UO faculty until 1998.

Meeting of the minds

It was music that brought Ed and Charmaine Coleman together in the beginning and also made them a fixture in the Eugene entertainment scene for years after they arrived in 1966.

“My mother’s side was all very musical, with some professionals in the family in Houston, where we lived when I was little,” Charmaine Coleman said. “Everyone realized quickly that I could sing, so they started teaching me. I sang for my great-aunt’s teacher colleagues and at church.”

When she was about 8 years old, her family moved to Richmond, Calif., where they lived in public housing but where the teachers at school and the nuns at church recognized her talent. One encouraged her to audition for a television talent show in San Francisco, and she won a spot on the program.

After high school, she attended University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. — “I had a small scholarship, but I have no clue how my parents managed to pay for it,” she said — where she was one of five black girls on campus.

She originally enrolled in music but as a matter of practicality switched to education. After graduation, she was working in Stockton when her cousin and the cousin’s boyfriend, who was a jazz musician and a friend of Ed Coleman’s, introduced them.

“They were going to a movie, but in the way that so many blind dates can go wrong, they didn’t tell me it was a date, so I wound up meeting them there and bringing another girl with me,” Ed Coleman said.

Charmaine laughed at the memory.

“I didn’t get upset,” she said. “I thought he was very good, he was playing good gigs uptown — and he had a car. My daddy always said I should not go out with a black guy who had a car. But my mom liked him from the beginning.”

Soon they were singing together, and they married on Dec. 1, 1962, when he was 29 and she was 25.

He played many of the famous spots in the San Francisco Bay Area — Hungry i, Purple Onion, Jazz Workshop, Black Hawk — and backed up jazz greats that included Ella Fitzgerald, Cal Tjader and Vince Guaraldi. While still in college, Johnny Mathis had been a frequent participant at jam sessions.

But some of Coleman’s less happy experiences in music helped fuel his civil rights activities.

“I remember stopping in Reno once with two white friends when we were on our way to perform in Colorado,” he said. “We went into a restaurant, and there was a black janitor mopping in the entryway, and he gave me the eye, and I knew exactly what he meant.”

Once inside, Coleman sat between his friends, “and I said, ‘No matter what happens, be cool,’ and a guy came up and walked back and forth around us and then looked at me and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, are you colored?’ and I said, ‘No, why do you ask?’ and he said, “We have a policy on the strip here, we don’t serve colored people.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s good, because I don’t eat them.’

“My friends wanted to get out of there right then, but I refused, and then the guy snapped his fingers and we got our breakfast and left.”

On another tour, he and his fellow musicians arrived with reservations at a huge hotel in Salt Lake City to check in, and upon their arrival the desk clerk suddenly remembered that a big convention was coming and there were no rooms available after all.

“I just picked up my bags and left,” Coleman said.

Six years later, while touring with Peter, Paul and Mary, “we ended up at the same hotel, and I said, ‘Oh man, they’re not going to let me stay at this hotel,’ and Peter Yarrow said, ‘Why not?’

“When I told him, he said, ‘If you don’t, we don’t, and we’ll let everyone know why.’ But since I was with Peter, Paul and Mary, I was yes-sirred and no-sirred practically to death.”

But all the hobnobbing with musical greats was eclipsed by meeting the Rev. Martin Luther King in San Francisco, when Coleman was roommates with the chairman of the civil rights group, Congress for Racial Equality, or CORE.

“Dr. King came to our flat for a meeting because we were so actively involved with sit-ins and fighting for equal opportunity for renting apartments and desegregating jobs,” he said.

“All these people gathered to see him, and when he was emerging from the car it got so quiet — in the music world we would say it was so quiet you could hear a zipper in the men’s room — and he came in and shook hands with everyone and then apologized for having to leave.

“When he walked out, it was like all the air had been sucked out of the room. We all knew we had been in the presence of someone really important.”